Me too, if I subscribe to communities in other instances, most of the time I see a different number of comments and posts here on lemmy.ml.

I’m using PocketCasts and I paid a one-time fee before it became subscription based (but there’s still a free tier), in order to be able to listen to podcast using the web app on PC. Thus I now have lifetime premium access.

I’m very satisfied with their service, I did not find any problems with both the Android app and the web app, moreover it has almost every feature I need, except voice to text conversion in order to be able to share slices of audio in text format (but there are dedicated apps for that).

I’m currently reading Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, which is the first book of the Expanse series. I haven’t watched the TV series, since I wanted to dive into the books without previous knowledge.

I just started this series this year by picking up Going Postal, which I finished something like a month ago. I liked it a lot and as my “gateway drug” into the Discworld, I think I will always have good memories of it.